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Eidos Montréal producer David Anfossi told Edge that farming out the boss fights to Grip Entertainment was a mistake -- not because Grip failed, but because the implementation and design of boss encounters was poor. "We knew that it would be a weakness for the game, that we had to make a compromise to deliver it [on] two levels. First, the boss fights were forced, which is not the Deus Ex experience. Second, there is no mix [of] solutions to tackle the boss fights, which is not Deus Ex either. We knew that before the release of the game, but there had to be some compromise. It [was] our decision."

Of course, it doesn't say why they subcontracted one of the integral parts of the game out. The pessimistic (or realistic) assumption was to make some street date. Either way, poor form.

Most PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable download titles can currently be activated and played on five systems. That's about to change.

Sony announced today that it will be reducing the activation count from five to two. The turning date is November 18, when Sony will hold a PlayStation Network maintenance. Any game purchased after that can be activated and played on only two systems. Any game purchased before then will continue to have the five system count (in other words, the two system limitation will not apply to purchases made before 11/18).

You've likely gleaned as much from yesterday's big Grand Theft Auto V debut trailer, but this morning's official announcement of the game from Rockstar confirms a "Los Santos" (Los Angeles-ish) setting, as well as the return of online multiplayer. "Grand Theft Auto V focuses on the pursuit of the almighty dollar in a re-imagined, present-day Southern California," the release reads, specifically pointing to "Los Santos and surrounding hills, countryside, and beaches" as the locales.

Rumors have been circulating today that Kmart stores have been selling copies of Modern Warfare 3 prior to its official debut next week. It's clear that a handful of copies were definitely sold, as several eBay listings for the game have been popping up (and taken down) all day.

Incidentally, if you find yourself with a legitimate retail Xbox copy, don't worry about playing it early. Stephen Toulouse, Microsoft's Xbox Live guru, has given the all-clear on Twitter.

Update: Stephen Toulouse has posted a new update on Twitter, stating that Activision has not authorized pre-release play of Modern Warfare 3. According to Toulouse, "Playing early may impact your account!" Seems a bit unfair to anyone who may have legitimately purchased the game from a retailer, but there you go.

Ah, the evil is still strong in Activision. You are not "allowed" to play your legitimately purchased copy online.And this is at the discretion of people who don't even run the network. I suppose this is what happens when you make a deal with the devil for early DLC. (There's gameplay reasons to not let people play early online (i.e., the advantage in unlocks) but really, it's minor)

I'm telling you, Xbox has become the CoD platform. If you'd make a list that includes PS3 and PC gaming as well, I think BF3 would be the top game at the moment and all the CoD games further down the list.

Fall is always full of great games, but this is the first time in quite some time that it's full of games that I'm both interested in and able to play. OTOH, it would probably be full if it had nothing but Skyrim in the release schedule...

The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.

I'm telling you, Xbox has become the CoD platform. If you'd make a list that includes PS3 and PC gaming as well, I think BF3 would be the top game at the moment and all the CoD games further down the list.

Fall is always full of great games, but this is the first time in quite some time that it's full of games that I'm both interested in and able to play. OTOH, it would probably be full if it had nothing but Skyrim in the release schedule...

XBOX is the FPS platform, so of course CoD wins by default (It also releases more often than any other series).

And Battlefield is the crown jewel of modern PC FPSs. It doesn't help that Activision alienated all the PC people with MW2.

Hell if you split it by continents, I think you'll find Battlefield suddenly comes on top in Europe.

The company just announced Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 sold 6.5 million units in the US and UK on its first day, good for $400 million. To put it in perspective, that's the biggest day-one for any entertainment product ever in history. This tops previous records set by Modern Warfare 2: a paltry $310 million and Black Ops, estimated to have made $360 million in its first day.

"One of the first things we did when we started on BioShock Infinite was to draw a graph with y and z axes, and to say that one of those axes was the number of enemies in an encounter and the other was the range of those enemies," Levine said. "In the original BioShock, the entire game lived in one corner of that graph – few enemies, all at close range - so the Electro Bolt and shotgun were perfect. BioShock Infinite is going to have much greater ranges and, potentially, far more enemies, so we're greatly increasing the spectrum of encounters that are possible, and that requires the player use a broader set of tools."

The best use of the Kinect allows players to scan and analyze Halo's characters and items. Once scanned, you can look up more info on each entry in the Library mode, where you can learn more about a Hunter's physiology, or about the inner workings of Halo's death-dealing pistol. For players who want to absorb Halo lore, or those who couldn't get enough scanning in the Metroid Prime series, the Library is surprisingly addictive.

Rather than add Xbox Live functionality to Halo's multiplayer mode, Anniversary features several recreated maps that function within the Halo: Reach engine. In fact, loading up Anniversary's multiplayer menu essentially boots up Reach, even reflecting as much on your Xbox Live status. Anniversary includes a new Firefight mission based on the campaign level "Halo," along with six maps: Hang 'em High, Prisoner, Beaver Creek, Damnation, Headlong and Timberland (from the PC version of Halo). Anniversary also includes a token to download the maps so they can be played from within Reach itself.

The crux of the rumor is that Nintendo has been working closely with third-party developers to help build the Wii U's online infrastructure. Since many of those developers expressed annoyance that Xbox Live is such a closed system, Nintendo will be embracing a more flexible, open-ended philosophy that should make working on the system less annoying for third-party publishers and developers.

Here's where things get more interesting (if exponentially more questionable as well): Supposedly Nintendo is in talks with EA to make EA's Origin service the digital distribution platform for Wii U. This would grow Origin significantly for EA and (according to the source) help Nintendo win back Western gamer support by putting their digital distribution strategy in the hands of a company that understands what gamers want from an online platform.

I asked Suarez why Activision wasn't prepared for the traffic, after having beta tested the game. "We knew MW3 was going to be big and we planned for a big demand, it's just the infrastructure is struggling to keep up with volume," Suarez admitted. "We did a beta, the beta was intended to give us the data on how everything would behave with people hitting different parts of the service and different parts of the site. But when you add the complexities of it being not only an online service but one that has a console component, a PC component, and a soon-to-be-released mobile component, all being released at the same time, it's never been done before at this scale."

So, it's been a week and the site still can't handle traffic. How long does it take to fix this shit already?

Game Group shares collapsed as the retailer warned that cash-strapped consumers were not buying nearly as many video games in the run-up to Christmas at they expected. The share price fell 40pc to 11.42p in early trading. Two years ago the shares were at ten times that level.

It’s possible to just run along roofs in a straight line with little getting in the way or breaking the flow of your movement. For me, the parkour always felt staccato in previous games; just as I would hit a groove, the game would stop me and I'd fumble over a ledge or hit a dead end. Locomotion here feels less abrupt, especially when scaling a vertical surface. The world is much more empowering.

This is important, as you are given control of a team that will kill for you. Curating your personal assassin hit-squad is better this time out, and earning their allegiance isn't always as simple as stopping guards from picking on themt. Sometimes I had to tail a pickpocket while others I freed from captivity. Your posse is more important to the narrative, as well. Using them is always a treat: you target an enemy and they pop out of nowhere and to kill them. When the target is dead, they disappear into the shadows. As in past games, you get to level up these side characters, giving you a sense of control and ownership.

Edge says that Ubisoft Montreal are using 'target boxes' created with the next Xbox's specs in mind. A source tells Edge that delivery of the first genuine dev kits is expected to reach studios before Christmas. They also say that all signs point to the next Microsoft console arriving at retail in late 2012.

These boxes are PCs using off-the-shelf components, and it is believed that AMD has supplied the GPU chip. Edge says that other studios, including EA, may also have these boxes now.

One Sony studio is also moving on from PS3 development to the next PlayStation console. Edge says that the studio was involved in the development of this system's graphics technology.

That certainly beats everyone's expectations just six months ago, right?

If this were true, it sounds like MS doesn't want to give Nintendo a chance to get a leg up on them. This sucks for Sony, however. I don't see them being nearly as agile as MS for moving up their console plans, and sales have shown they can't afford to stick to their "10 year" plan.

I feel like they're pushing it out too quickly. The technological leaps from NES > SNES/Gen > N64/PS1 > PS2/XBOX/GC were pretty incredible, and even necessary, based on the pace of technological leaps. Today, I doubt what they come up with will be amazing enough to warrant $400-500.

I can't find the article I'm thinking of, but one of the recent rumors was that the next 360 will be more affordable than past systems on release day.

I feel like they're pushing it out too quickly. The technological leaps from NES > SNES/Gen > N64/PS1 > PS2/XBOX/GC were pretty incredible, and even necessary, based on the pace of technological leaps. Today, I doubt what they come up with will be amazing enough to warrant $400-500.

I'll disagree. MW3 practically hard locks going in and out of menus (the bg music stops) and using the dashboard is a chore on any cpu intensive games (which is pretty much all of them any more). I can't wait for something with more horsepower (and RAM).

The PS3 has a graphics card from just before the latest big change in graphics cards, and the X360 has one that is just in the beginning of that transition. Both of them could use a more modern GPU, and the amount of RAM is a bad joke.

The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.

I have absolutely no info here. I think an Xbox 3, at least, would continue down the path of the 360 with a multicore CPU and a regular GPU similar to today's Radeon 6000/GTX 500 series - MS doesn't seem to want to take chances, and that design is easy to develop for. What would be very interesting, however, is if one of them can manage to put some stacked RAM on either or both of the CPU and GPU. Done correctly, you could get insanely high memory bandwidths at low clockspeeds, which would be very interesting for a GPU at least. The latency wouldn't be great (unless you dialed up the clocks back where they usually, which sort of defeats the purpose), which would seem to hurt a CPU, but say that you combined that with a nice big shared cache to hide that latency... Could happen.

IBM is the obvious choice for a custom-made CPU, but it's not the only possibility. A few years back, some rather persistent rumors said that Intel was courting Sony as a customer for a Larrabee successor, and at the end even said that Sony was on board. Larrabee died, but the recently showed Knights Ferry chip is the successor to that. Sony has poured money into silly chip research before, and I'm sure that "50 cores" makes their mouths water. Say that you have one or a couple modern Conroe/Nehalem/Sandy Bridge cores and a big mass of weak cores - doesn't that sound like a natural successor to Cell? If they can make it do graphics as well, like Cell was supposed to, it might work.

The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.

To be fair, the dashboard was a chore from day-one, I don't think more power is always the answer, I think using it wisely is a bigger problem for some devs.

You make a fair point. But I think it improved on the second and third iterations... before eventually degrading again (thanks to game starting to squeeze every ounce they could out of the system?). This is probably a crazy expensive idea, but if they could give it some cheap low-end dedicated processor, I feel like that'd be half the battle right there.

Speaking with Kotaku earlier this week Daniel Suarez, vice president of production at Actvision, walked us through how one of the most experienced online gaming companies in the world was blindsided by the demands for their new stat-tracking, community-building Call of Duty service Elite.

"We had all sorts of issues: A broken registration system; poor scalability of the service; poor experience trying to login to the web or console and confusion in terms of getting 2XP or your Founders Entitlements," he said. "A lot of this was just core infrastructure issues - mainly tied to specific databases serving up data for the console, web and ultimately mobile (when that's released).

When designing a website for a franchise that grows by millions of players per year, scalability of service shouldn't be a priority.

But the key issue isn't really about the number of people using the service. it's a bit more complicated than that.

The main problem seems to be the database and how information is being pulled off of it. A chief component of Elite is the ability to store detailed player stats and then pull them off of the database remotely in specific ways. These queries are a sort of question that asks the database to sort through the data and send back an answer.

"It's all specific to the data structure within the Elite database and how those queries are called and delivered to the web service, console or mobile," Suarez said. "A call goes into the service to pull something—the database needs to take that data (either game or service or whatever it might be) and twist it, pull it, and deliver it in multiple ways to the end users. Now multiply a complex query by millions—non-stop—for a week. That's the world we live in right now."

Suarez acknowledged that some of the queries weren't created as efficiently as they should have been, but he said the main issue has been that Activision didn't prepare for the pure volume of requests that consoles are delivering.

"We suck at coding."

"Due to the fact that we didn't have a console app on Black Ops, there wasn't a clear picture of user behavior coming from the console," Suarez said. "The beta helped us refine the web experience from a feature set, but really didn't give us all the metrics at scale we needed, specifically the additional load from the console....which was a lot higher than our expectations. This was key contributor to the performance and stability issues consumers have experienced."

That's why the site runs better on the web than consoles – oh wait.

"We've prioritized premium subscribers into the service via a prioritization queue, so if you are a paid member you get into the console or web automatically," he said. "Free users, due to demand, are put into a queue and allowed in when we have bandwidth or capacity."

This is smart. Too bad their servers are so ****ed I can't even get to the log-in page to receive that priority.

The main problem seems to be the database and how information is being pulled off of it. A chief component of Elite is the ability to store detailed player stats and then pull them off of the database remotely in specific ways. These queries are a sort of question that asks the database to sort through the data and send back an answer.

"It's all specific to the data structure within the Elite database and how those queries are called and delivered to the web service, console or mobile," Suarez said. "A call goes into the service to pull something—the database needs to take that data (either game or service or whatever it might be) and twist it, pull it, and deliver it in multiple ways to the end users. Now multiply a complex query by millions—non-stop—for a week. That's the world we live in right now."

Suarez acknowledged that some of the queries weren't created as efficiently as they should have been, but he said the main issue has been that Activision didn't prepare for the pure volume of requests that consoles are delivering.

I need to send them some of my DBA's, their excellent at creating and tuning SQL. If you aren't a pro at SQL, I could see how you can make mistakes. As well, if this new system was never tested with the proper volumes, I could see how some SQL would need a major overhaul.

"We've prioritized premium subscribers into the service via a prioritization queue, so if you are a paid member you get into the console or web automatically," he said. "Free users, due to demand, are put into a queue and allowed in when we have bandwidth or capacity."

LOL. And here I've been waiting to make sure I can access Elite from my Xbox before I enter the code for the paid service. So far I have only gotten in through the web on a Mac. I guess I'll enter the code for the paid service so I have priority.

I managed to log on at midnight Sunday, and once you're in you're semi-golden, as the registration and log-in servers seem to be the bottleneck. Sure, graphics and heatmaps weren't loading properly, but eery time I hit refresh when I got home from work, I was still logged in.

I need to send them some of my DBA's, their excellent at creating and tuning SQL. If you aren't a pro at SQL, I could see how you can make mistakes. As well, if this new system was never tested with the proper volumes, I could see how some SQL would need a major overhaul.

Not many dev houses actually have people that write SQL, its usually generated by some sort of IDE software. Which is why its so shite.

We see our role as to make good stuff. With any property or new property, it takes as long as it takes. You have to make the right game before you release it. We are convinced that the industry has come around in some ways to our way of thinking, which is there is not much middle ground anymore. There is only room for stuff of the highest quality on the consoles.

What did you learn from the DLC for Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption?

DH: The two key lessons we learned were that if you want a vibrant multiplayer community, you have got to provide content frequently and fairly quickly after release, which we tried to do with Red Dead.

And I think the two GTA episodes, from a creative standpoint, were absolutely fantastic. We are very, very, very proud of them. And we are kind of compelled due to various other business factors to make them that size -- but something at $20 for DLC, maybe $10 is a more exciting price point.

Rather than monetary compensation, the firm representing those involved with the lawsuit (Edelson McGuire) is looking only for the free copies of Battlefield 1943 originally advertised; a promise which EA "could not, and never intended, to keep," according to the firm.

An employee of Canada's EB Games (read: GameStop) has let us know that, in one of the company's shittier moves in recent years, the distinction between "new" and "used" games (at least in Canada) is apparently going to be all but removed.

UPDATE 2: Another reader, who claims to work for EB, told Kotaku that this isn't true. As previously mentioned, Kotaku has contacted the company and will update this post should it comment.

A former GameStop employee has filed the suit with the Superior Court of California, claiming that these security checks infringed upon worker's rights to uninterrupted breaks, and that workers paid hourly rates were not compensated for the time it took to complete these checks.

In terms of damages, the suit is asking for one hour's pay for each day an employee did not receive their full, entitled break times under California law.

Despite a 2AM email announcing it, we managed to find out that December 6 is the big day for Microsoft's next Xbox 360 dashboard update. Major Nelson reconfirmed as much this morning on his blog, noting the variety of new features that the update will bring: cloud storage for games saves and profiles, beacons and Facebook sharing, "enhanced family settings," a more thorough set of voice commands with Kinect, and, of course, Bing voice search (US, UK, and Canada).

Beyond the new functionality, the Dashboard will see a visual redesign, and the introduction of "customized applications for television, movies, internet videos, sports and music" (YouTube, cable TV, and so forth). Frankly, we're just eager to keep talking to a machine instead of leaving the couch.

The other feature mentioned is support for "Beacons" which go one step further than broadcasting what you're playing or watching right now by allowing users to flag what they want to play, and lets friends on XBL or Facebook see that so they can meet you for a game.